


The Making of a Man

by JiM



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Break it again, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 22:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiM/pseuds/JiM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are always rumors about a man like Phil Coulson.  They are all wrong but there is a grain of truth in them all ~ Phil Coulson was made, not born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Making of a Man

**Author's Note:**

> Not happy, really.

There are rumors about Coulson, there always have been.  He’s simply too blandly efficient to not be a target of gossip and light badinage among the younger agents.  Depending on the experience or maturity level of the whisperers, he’s a robot, he’s a freaky genetic experiment, he is actually triplets, he’s a clone.  They are all patently ridiculous and are laughed over at all but the highest level.  Because they all have one germ of truth wrapped in layers of teasing envy and admiration; Phil Coulson _was_ made, not born.

It doesn’t come to light until over a year after his funeral.  Not long after the brass plaque with his name has been fixed to SHIELD’s Wall of Honored Dead, there is an attack on an obscure box factory complex in semi-rural Kansas.  To the public at large, there was a gas leak and a boiler explosion.  At SHIELD, however, there is a great deal of concern regarding the surgical strike and destruction of their main Phase Two weapons R&D site. 

A month later, four SHIELD agents are killed, five are seriously wounded and three are declared MIA or compromised at a SHIELD research facility in Chicago.  One of the surviving wounded SHIELD personnel claims to have seen a ghost.  According to her, the man leading the strike team against them was Phil Coulson.  When Fury hears her story, he tilts his head in what might be read as sympathy for her trauma-induced hallucinations and nods to the doctor to put her under.

It’s just bad luck that the story filters up or down to the members of the Avengers Initiative.  Stark’s ability to circumvent their electronic security is nothing short of miraculous; if he were a virus, he’d be Ebola and nothing would survive his assault.  This is what Fury tells himself when the next attack is foiled by the Avengers before SHIELD has even scrambled.  Then he is told that they are coming in hot with a special package from the raid.  A cold, sick certainty begins building in his gut at the tone of Agent Romanov’s single transmission.

“We’ll need the top-level interrogation room and Director Fury. Highest containment protocols **demanded**.”  Agents like Romanov don’t demand; he can hear her rage in the very evenness of her tone.

He nods at the Duty Agent to radio acknowledgment and goes to get himself a cup of coffee.  By the time he’s stirred in the milk, other SHIELD operatives are reporting in about the near-total destruction of the NeuroPsych Division’s research facility in Butler, PA.  Less than half an hour later, he is watching Barton bring the jet to a skilled and completely unflashy landing on the roof of headquarters.  Highest containment protocols mean level 7 agents and above only are there to witness as Captain America and Agent Romanov escort a man thought dead for over a year down the ramp and across the rooftop.  The prisoner’s hands are bound to a thin chain shackled around his waist.  This is a precaution he approves of – no one who ever knew him could presume that this man could be a neutralized threat with his hands bound before or behind him.

When they come abreast of him, Fury sees anger and mistrust and sheer bewilderment carefully hidden behind the eyes of his agent and his hero.  The prisoner’s eyes glare at him with undisguised hatred.  Then they are past him and heading into the secure elevator.  He takes a deep breath and then turns to face the rest of the Avengers team.

“Did you know he was alive?”  Tony Stark asks in a very clipped, precise tone.

“No.” 

That, at least, is the truth.  All the records had indicated that the body had been cremated and his ashes interred properly.  Now he wonders vaguely whose cremains were tucked into that neat little hole in the marble wall in a Maryland cemetery.

He can see the simple sincerity of his answer has allowed the rage and distrust that swirled around them to bleed away. Now what he sees in their eyes is uncertainty and confusion.

“Sir,” Agent Barton says, “ _is_ that Agent Coulson?”

He has no answer.

“I’ll brief you all in an hour.  Interrogation room 7.”

When Stark opens his mouth to complain or argue or snark, Fury just holds up his hand in a gesture that even he can tell looks like defeat. It startles them all into silence. “One hour,” he repeats, then turns and heads down the stairs.

Half an hour later, he has the results of the blood tests. They show what he knew from the moment those ice-blue eyes had met his for the first time in ten years.  Philip Coulson no longer exists.

 

* * *

When he and Hill enter the briefing room, the Avengers are all present, freshly showered but still vibrating with reaction and mistrust.  Before Rogers can do more than open his mouth, Fury begins.

“Ten years ago, just before I took over as director of this agency, SHIELD operatives managed to capture a man named Riaan van Zyl.  He was on the ‘Most Wanted’ list for a string of war crimes he committed while leading various private armies throughout Africa and the former Soviet Union.

 

“Once he’d been processed, he was slated for disposal.”

“What does that mean?” Rogers asks, his jaw set as if he knows he won’t like the answer.

Agent Hill answers him without looking away from her director’s face.  “It means he was to be interrogated until he had given us every useful scrap of knowledge he possessed and then killed.  It is fairly standard procedure.”

“Jesus,” Banner says in a low tone. A muscle above Captain America’s lip tenses but he says nothing.  Neither Stark nor Barton looks up.

“Trust me, Dr. Banner; the world is a better place without Van Zyl in it.  He was a vicious killer. Worse – he was very good at it.  If he took a contract, it would be filled.  Any group he led, whether it was a squad of ten or an army of thousands, was successful.  Partly because his own men were often more terrified of him than they were of whatever they faced.  He was a textbook psychopath and he left a string of atrocities in his wake.”

Fury taps a few buttons on the table in front of him and a series of pictures and video clips begin to play on the wall screen behind him.  He doesn’t turn to watch because he’s seen it before.  He has seen the smoky, bloody images, heard the screams, smelled the piles of corpses left to rot in the sun. And the photos of the man responsible.

“He could be Coulson’s twin,” Barton says.  “Is that it? Is that what this is about, sir?”

Fury doesn’t answer. Instead he takes a deep breath because this is the only way he will be able to finish this before the explosion he knows is coming.

“My predecessor apparently authorized an experiment.  NeuroPsych was working on countering indoctrination and programming techniques and they wanted a guinea pig.”

“Isn’t that banned by the European Convention?” Banner asks.

“Yes,” Fury says heavily.

He doesn’t mention that the five NeuroPsych goombas responsible for the creation of Phil Coulson were reassigned separately to some of the least interesting and distant SHIELD bases he could find.  It beat his first and second responses which were, respectively, shooting them each in the head and turning them over to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.  He didn’t shoot them because he wasn’t a murderer and he didn’t send them postage-prepaid to the Hague because he didn’t want anyone else in the world to know that it was even possible to scrub a person’s entire identity and replace it with something completely fabricated.

He doesn’t tell anyone that he spent the first ten minutes after his introduction to Project Rebirth sitting in his office and shaking from reaction and adrenaline.  Some of it was sheer nausea; there was a part of him that said that merely killing Riaan van Zyl would have been a far kinder fate than what those five educated men and women had done in their labs, all in the name of SHIELD. 

Because, as they explained it, at first eagerly and then becoming hesitant and bewildered by the ice creeping over his features, what they had done was something so repellant, so abhorrent that he had begun to wonder at how **normal** they each looked.  How baffled they were at his lack of praise for their newly discovered method of breaking down an enemy to his component psychological parts and then picking and choosing amongst them to create a simulacrum of the perfect SHIELD agent.

 

_Fury stood in a little room and looked through the one-way mirror at the blandly pleasant expression on the face of a man who had recently been one of the toughest and smartest mercenaries South Africa had ever produced._

_“So you’ve managed to break someone’s mind down to the point where he is a drooling mess and rebuild it to give me … what?  A paperwork golem?  A devoted accountant with SHIELD’s best interests at heart?”_

_“Oh no, Sir,” Dr. Henderson said smugly, “he’s much better than that.  He retains all of van Zyl’s physical and tactical capabilities, but he thinks he’s someone very different indeed.  The fascinating thing about the mind, the thing most laypeople don’t realize…”_

_Fury, recognizing a nearly pointless and wholly boring lecture coming on, held up one hand and said, “The bottom line, Dr Henderson. Now.”_

_“The man you see sitting in there is a skilled and intelligent operative whose loyalty to SHIELD is guaranteed because it is all he knows.”_

_“Really? Because his file says he’s a psychopath personally responsible for over 700 confirmed kills and regime change in at least three African nations.”_

_“He’s not that man any longer, Assistant Director, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. That man, van Zyl, is gone, as thoroughly as if he were dead.  But the useful part of him remains.”_

_“And how did you achieve this wonder, Henderson?”_

“Torture, drugs and indoctrination,” Tony Stark says into the weighted silence in the wake of Fury’s acknowledgment.  He looks up and his sneer doesn’t begin to cover the horror in his eyes.  “Really interesting group of folks you have working for you, Nick.”

Stark makes a sharp movement as if flicking something off his fingers.  New images begin to play across the screen.  This time, Fury turns to look but he has also seen these before. 

On the screen, Van Zyl is injected, beaten, hosed with ice water, electrocuted and more, always under pitiless bright lights.  The timestamps and notations on the corners of the videos indicate this is official footage intended for research purposes.  There is no audio so Van Zyl’s screams and moans, his cries and curses are unheard. There is no blood.

“SHIELD’s Greatest Hits medley, people,” Stark says.  “This is who we really work for.”

“No,” Fury says.  “This is NOT who we are.”  But it is a weak protest, he knows, because he can see that Stark has put the pieces together faster than anyone else, as usual.

More footage follows; the same man is shown recovering in a hospital room that looks enough like SHIELD medical to pass.  This time, there is audio.  A man in a dark suit comes in, smiling and holding a cup of coffee.

 

_“Phil, man, it’s good to see you in one piece!  I thought you were a goner for sure!”  The visitor is grinning and shaking his hand before handing the patient the Styrofoam cup of coffee._

_The man in the bed is clearly confused, his eyes darting back and forth between the cup and his visitor._

_“Man, don’t you remember me?  Dave Solomon, we were in the Marines together.  You helped me get into SHIELD, said it was the best way to make a positive difference in the world.”  The last two sentences are said with peculiar emphasis.  The patient’s expression goes blank for a moment, then he blinks._

_“Dave,” he says, “yeah, I remember you. You had a lousy high-and-tight, right?”_

_The man in the suit grins and nods.  “That’s right.  They told me you had total amnesia, but that’s not true, is it, Phil?  You can remember bits and pieces, can’t you?  Like the fact that you love your coffee with milk and no sugar.”  Again the queer emphasis and the blank expression on the patient’s face, then the blink and a smile_. 

They watch a few more minutes of programming before Fury sighs. “Turn it off, Stark.” The screen goes blank.

“So your people tortured van Zyl until what?  His personality broke down and left you a blank slate to work with, is that it, Fury?”

“Is that what we just saw, Director?” Rogers asks.

Fury can only nod.  He wants to shout that the men and women responsible for this are not and never were his people but he knows that he is the one who took the results of their work and made it, made _him_ , his own.

“They were trying to remove the psychopathology, they said.  Using a mix of sleep deprivation and psychotropic drugs, the team excised van Zyl’s personality.  It was Dr. Solomon who determined that they could feed van Zyl small pieces of information and that his mind, desperate for some kind of self knowledge, would weave it together into a coherent whole.  That he literally built his new personality from scraps and stories they told him about who he used to be.”

They had been so pleased, so certain of their method when the result sat before them, composed, demonstrating empathy, compassion, unimpaired intelligence and unquestioned loyalty to SHIELD and its stated aims. They had told Fury it would last until the day of his death.

“So we found a way to kill van Zyl but keep his body alive for our use, sir?”  Hill asks with her eyebrow cocked.

“SHIELD’s not just into clean energy, folks, they’re big into recycling, as well,” Stark spits.  “In their own special way, of course.”

“Philip Coulson was the result of Project Rebirth and was judged to be a complete success.  His background was sealed and we slotted him into place as a field agent.  His work was impeccable and he was personally responsible for some of this agency’s most important achievements and successes.

“And then he died.”

“Obviously not.  So what really happened, Fury?”  Rogers asks, voice flat.

It is Barton who answers him, “Loki. Loki happened, didn’t he?”  He stares at the now-blank wall over Fury’s shoulder.

“During the attack on the carrier, things were pretty chaotic in Medical.  Somehow they managed to resuscitate Coulson but I never got word.  In the evacuation of wounded, Coul…van Zyl was transported to a hospital in the city and someone else’s corpse wearing Coulson’s wristband was bagged and tagged. He must have switched identities with one of the dead and then slipped away as soon as he was healthy enough.”

“So something about Loki’s scepter and the Tesseract energy restored van Zyl to himself and the attacks on the SHIELD sites have been van Zyl using Coulson’s knowledge to get revenge,” Romanov states calmly.

There is silence for a moment and Fury, who has not felt self-conscious since he was 18, feels himself begin to slump under the weight of their stares.

“How many?” Hill’s voice raps out.  “How many walking time-bombs like Coulson have we got in the ranks?”  Her omission of the word ‘sir’ is the same as if she had punched him.

“None.  I became director shortly after Coulson became active. I shut down Project Rebirth and scattered the team.”

“Why?” Rogers asks, leaning forward as if the answer were very important to him. “If not for Loki, Coulson might still be your perfect agent.  Why not make more of him?”

Fury wonders which truth he should give him, if there is any that could possibly heal the broken trust he can see in the eyes of everyone around the table except for Romanov.  She never had any trust for him to lose.

He can’t even look at them as he says, “Because there are some things that shouldn’t be done, not even in war.  That shouldn’t be possible or we’re no better than our enemies.”

“It’s no different than killing him. God knows we do enough of that around here.” Banner sounds exhausted at this latest betrayal by SHIELD, exhausted but not surprised as the rest of them have been.

Stark’s huff of bitter laughter sounds like he’s choking. “Oh no, it’s worse.  Because stealing someone’s mind but keeping his body is … that’s some pretty towering arrogance and cynicism there, Fury.  The Greeks had a word for it - hubris.”

“Should I have had Coulson taken out and shot, Stark?  You didn’t know him then, didn’t see what he was like.  It would have been like executing someone with Multiple Personality Disorder for the crimes of one personality when all that was left was the innocent personality.  And…”

Stark is still staring at him with furious eyes.  “And what, Fury?  What could you say that could possibly justify this?”

“I liked him.” Fury rubs his hands over his face and tries to keep his gaze locked on Stark’s because he can deal with anger.  “He became one of my best friends and I just forgot he’d ever been anyone, anything else.”

“And now?” Barton’s voice rasped through the room.  Those two words tell Fury everything he needs to know about the truth of the rumors he had been hearing about Coulson and Barton. He sighs, thinking of the epic fallout from this disaster that he will likely still be cleaning up years from now.

“Now I have to figure out what to do with him, whether he can be re-educated.  Henderson thinks it’s possible to overlay another personality but says the Coulson one is gone.  He’s on his way here from Arkansas now.”

“Hands up, everyone who thinks we ought to use Henderson for target practice?” Stark snaps, hand shooting up.

“I have some radiation experiments that we could try on him,” Banner offers flatly, eyes not even flashing green.

Rogers frowns at them both.  “Are you considering allowing Dr Henderson to continue his ‘work’ in this area, Fury?  Will you let him torture that man again to make him over into someone else?”

Even Fury doesn’t know the answer to that question.  He taps another button on the table in front of him and the screen switches to a view of the interrogation room in which they have placed the prisoner.  The room is all scoured steel, from the chair bolted to the deck to the metal table on which his hands rest.  Each wrist has been cuffed to it through holes in the edge of the table and there is a band around his torso securing him to the chair.

The man in that room has a familiar face but nothing else about him even hints at who he was to them. His eyes are burning with a banked rage.  He is talking to the surveillance camera and the twist to his lips is more foreign than even the lurching slide of his words as his accent slips back and forth between a clipped South African pronunciation and the softer middle Atlantic American accent they all know better.

“…again, Fury.  Might as well, right?  Who’ll it be this time, eh?”

He stops and blinks his reddened eyes and makes an abortive attempt to wipe them but is unable to bend to meet his hands and the cuffs are too short to allow any movement.  He has obviously tested this because blood drips slowly from both wrists. White foam is collecting in the corners of his mouth as he continues to rant.

“They called van Zyl a monster but he had nothing on you folk, did he?  He liked the killing, sure, but at least he paid attention when he was cutting someone into shreds. Not like your scientists and doctors who just sat and watched and made notes and couldn’t be bothered to listen to him screaming while they killed him, one memory at a time…” Fury mutes the feed but no one can look away from the still-ranting prisoner.

“Permission to be dismissed, sir?” Barton shoots to his feet and is at the door before he has even finished his sentence. When Fury nods, he leaves.  There is silence in the room behind him for only a few breaths before Romanov opens her mouth.

“Agent Romanov, go after him, please.  Keep him from doing anything rash.”

She is also in motion before Fury has finished speaking. The silence in her wake is broken by Rogers.

“He was just referring to van Zyl as if he were a separate person.  Does that mean he hasn’t reverted to his original personality?”

“We don’t know, Captain. The plain fact is, we don’t know a damned thing about that man, other than the fact that he is no longer Phil Coulson.”

“And that he never really was,” Rogers’ mouth twists as he says that and his look is challenging.

“No, that’s where you’re wrong. He **was** Phil Coulson and that man, even if he was a comic book cutout, he gave his life trying to save the world.” Stark slaps his hand down on the table.  “And because of who he was, **that** man there, he deserves better than to be unmade and remade in whatever image you come up with.”

“Well, what do you suggest, Mr. Stark?” Agent Hill asks coolly.  “We can’t just turn him loose on the world; van Zyl was a rabid dog before his personality was erased.  That man there,” she points to the feed still on the screen, “has attacked three SHIELD research sites and killed 23 agents and civilian contractors.  Even if he is neither van Zyl or Coulson, he seems to have the skills and knowledge of both to draw on and he obviously is intent on taking down as much of SHIELD as he can.”

“He must be accessing van Zyl’s hidden accounts to pay for the strike teams he’s assembled,” Fury’s mind turns toward that relatively simple problem.  “Get someone on tracing the money and whether or not he’s safehoused information on SHIELD operations somewhere.”

“I’m on it,” she says and is already speaking into her headset as she makes her way out of the briefing room.

Fury is left with Rogers, Banner and Stark all staring at him.  Banner’s gaze keeps flicking up to the screen, then back down to Fury’s face.  Perhaps he is wondering when Fury will authorize similar experimentation on him and Fury can’t even blame him.  Then a line forms between Banner’s brows and he frowns at the screen above Fury’s head.  The other two men are staring, too, so Fury twists to look, tapping the audio feed.

 

Barton has entered the prisoner’s room, Romanov behind him.

“You two the firing squad then? God, Fury’s a piece of work, isn’t he? Sending you two to do his dirty work.”  The man’s words are strangely clipped, the vowel sounds flatter than American English.

“Afrikaans?” Banner asks but no one answers.

“He didn’t send us,” Barton says pacing slowly around the table.  Romanov sits on one corner, to the left side of the screen and the right of the prisoner.

“Then why are you here?  Come to gawk at the wreck of yet another of SHIELD’s R&D projects?”  The sneer is all wrong on Coulson’s face and none of them will ever be able to think of it as anything else.

“I wanted to see for myself if there was anything left of Coulson in there.”

That gets the man’s attention and he turns his head to stare at Barton.  His gaze goes foggy for a moment, then he nods once. “You’re the lover, then.  I wasn’t sure; Coulson’s memories aren’t as easy to get at as van Zyl’s; not his personal ones, anyway.”

He seems to notice their stricken gazes on him and quirks his lip. “There’s nothing here for you; Coulson’s gone. So’s van Zyl.  There’s no one home, kiddies. All that’s left are ghosts.”

“Then who are you?” Romanov asks calmly.

He laughs, a short sharp noise. “What, you need something to close out the file? Tell Fury my name is Nemo.”

Romanov tips her head a little, studying him.  “That’s what Odysseus called himself when the Cyclops asked. Before he blinded and killed him.”

The glittering blue eyes rest on her.  “van Zyl liked the classics.”

He twists to look at Barton who is still pacing back and forth behind him but Barton won’t even look at him.  There is what might be described as a softening of his features.

“Coulson loved you.”

Barton finally stops pacing and turns to look at the man calling himself Nemo.

“Why are you telling us that?”

“Because I want you to do Coulson one last favor.  Kill me.”

“…the Hell?”

The man’s words are urgent now, his pronunciation slipping back to something closer to Coulson’s smoother accent.  “Fury’s got someone on the way right now, hasn’t he?  They’re going to try it all over again and I … don’t want that.”

Barton and Romanov exchange a long look.

“Please!  You have no idea what it’s like, having yourself stripped away like that, thread by thread.  van Zyl’s still screaming somewhere in my head.”

The blood drains away from Barton’s face and Fury’s fingers twitch toward his headset to call Security and send them to the cell.  Rogers’ hand covers his, pinning it to the desk top. 

Nemo is nearly screaming now and there is fresh blood running down his wrists and pattering to the table top as he shouts.  “They took everything! Everything, do you understand?  And then they tossed him scraps and crumbs and were so damned pleased when he filled in the blanks so readily … hell, van Zyl wasn’t even gay! But Coulson just assumed he was because they forgot to tell him he had a wife or a girlfriend.  They wanted him married to the job.” 

He snorts and says more quietly, “They got that, didn’t they? Just not the way they thought they would.  He was their perfect tool for ten years and now he’s dead. Riaan van Zyl is dead, too.  I’m whatever’s left and that’s mostly hate and spite.  Kill me.  Please.”

Nemo slumps and his fists are clenched on the table, smearing the blood that had pooled earlier from his wounded wrists.  He whispers to the tabletop, “Please. I’d rather be dead than unmade.”

Barton looks up at Romanov and she looks back; there is a whole conversation taking place between one breath and the next. Then she blinks once and he nods, a barely there movement. 

Barton walks back and stands behind Nemo, resting his hands lightly on the man’s shoulders.  When he turns his head to look up at Barton, there is such hope in his eyes that Fury’s hand clenches even under Rogers’ iron grip.

Barton nods fractionally and Nemo slumps a little in relief.  His eyes close as Barton slides a hand along his jaw and the other is laid across his forehead.  They are both motionless for a moment, then Barton leans forward.  Tipping Nemo’s head slightly to the side, Barton kisses his cheek gently.  Then, as he straightens, his hands twist sharply.  The dull grinding noise of breaking vertebrae seems loud to the watchers.

Barton lets go and Nemo’s body sags.  Then he is moving toward the door of the interrogation room and Romanov falls into step with him.  Neither of them look toward the camera and Fury thinks that he will probably never see their eyes again.

There is a slow draining away of tension in the briefing room.  When Fury twitches his hand this time, Rogers allows him to reach out and turn off the video feed that now shows nothing but a dead man in an empty gray room.  Looking around at the remaining men who formed his team of superheroes, Fury vaguely wonders if he is destined to become the next corpse sitting in an empty room.

Stark stands abruptly, startling the other two into motion as well.  He leaves without a word.  So does Banner.  He has no doubt that they will be going after their missing team mates because that’s who they are now, a team - Coulson’s team. The irony is not lost on him. Especially not when Captain America stops in the doorway and says in low, cool tones, “Fury? Don’t call us.”

Nicholas Fury sits in an empty gray room and thinks about making and unmaking men and wonders if he has just finished the process on himself.

**Author's Note:**

> "Nemo" means "no one".


End file.
